London 2012: engaging, inspiring and transforming

The main aims of London 2012 were: increasing public participation across multiple sports, the urban transformation of east London – where the Games were largely based – and boosting both sustainability and economic opportunities in the city and beyond.

After the Games, the legacy was broadened to include formal recognition of the role that the Games had played in bringing communities together, with a particular focus on driving social change and encouraging individuals to volunteer their time and skills for the benefit of others.

Transforming the heart of East London

Hosting the Olympic Games presented the opportunity to rejuvenate a 560-acre site in the east of the city, an area which historically had featured an industrial site. As a result of the regeneration, 4,000 new trees have been planted since 2012, bringing the total to 13,000 trees; bird numbers increased greatly; and endangered invertebrate species began to inhabit the park.

A major clean-up initiative, Changing Places, engaged local residents to deliver more than 40,000 volunteer hours and extend the regeneration being undertaken in the Olympic Park for London 2012 into the neighbouring communities in the East End of London.

Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park has become a dynamic new heart for East London and played a central part in the transformation of this area of the city. All the permanent Games venues in the park are operational, generating jobs for local people, staging high-profile events and attracting more than six million visitors a year.

The park is a place where people live, work and visit. Managed by the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), which formed in 2012, it generates opportunities for local people and drives innovation and economic growth in the city and the UK.

Between 2012 and 2019, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park underwent the physical transformation from Games-time focal point and home to various competition venues to a destination with brand-new parklands and playgrounds for local, regional, national and international visitors, two new business districts and work on five new housing neighbourhoods.

The green space in and around the park is the largest created in London in a century. The successful application of the Olympic Delivery Authority’s Biodiversity Action Plan resulted in the creation of 45 hectares of richly biodiverse, attractive green and blue habitat.

Inspiring a generation to choose sport

While preparing to host the Olympic Games London 2012, the UK invested in initiatives to increase participation in sport, especially among young people, and boost the development of sports facilities. High-performance sport was also promoted as a motivational tool to encourage participation.

Funds for improved participation, education and sport infrastructure accessibility contributed to the projects. Between 2012 and 2015, 106 community facilities were upgraded, and 400,000 Londoners participated in grassroots sport and physical activities through the Mayor of London Sport Legacy programme.

By 2017, more than 41,000 children had met national recommended levels of physical activity, having participated in Change4Life Sports Clubs, part of the Youth Sport Trust charity. These clubs harness the inspiration of the Olympic Games London 2012 to encourage children who are less active to engage in physical activity.

Get Set, the Organising Committee’s education programme, was set up to spread the Olympic spirit in schools and educate children on the Olympic values of friendship, excellence and respect. Eighty-five per cent of all UK schools participated in Get Set, with 92 per cent of teachers reporting that their pupils were inspired by the Games. Almost the same proportion of teachers (91 per cent) surveyed in 2016 agreed that as a result of Get Set, pupils were more motivated. By 2018, the initiative had reached more than half of all 3-19-year-olds across the UK.

Teachers also reported boosts to pupils’ learning engagement, self-confidence and team-working skills. Children themselves were also aware of Get Set’s positive impact. When surveyed in 2017, 89 per cent believed the scheme had helped them to develop new skills, and almost the same number (88 per cent) had a desire to achieve more.

After the Games, the British Olympic Association and the British Paralympic Association took over responsibility for developing and evolving the current programme. In the run-up to the 2020 Games, Get Set launched “Travel to Tokyo” to engage young people. Following the postponement of the Games, this was refocused to increase engagement with families and give them activities to take part in at home.

Although significant progress was made, the increase in sport participation did not meet the government-announced goal of 2 million additional people in sport in the UK. The evidence on sport participation legacy following London 2012 is mixed and inconclusive, as the results from different surveys and studies vary depending on the time frame, methodology, socio-demographic groups studied and definitions of sport participation.

Overseas, the Inspire a Generation vision stimulated the International Inspiration programme, which was established to create a positive legacy for youth in developing nations. By 2016, the programme had reached more than 25 million people in 20 countries. The initiative trained more than 255,000 teachers, coaches and young leaders; and influenced 55 policies, strategies or legislative changes. In 2016, International Inspiration formally merged with United Purpose, a charity which continues to use sport as a tool to deliver a range of development programmes across the world.

The Games as an economic boost

Shortly after the end of London 2012, the UK Government set a four-year ambition to secure at least GBP 11 billion of economic trade and investment benefits from the Games. This target was met within 14 months, and was last reported as being in excess of GBP 14.2 billion. This included GBP 4.72 billion of inward investment, GBP 1.5 billion of Olympic-related high-value opportunities won by UK companies, and GBP 5.9 billion of additional export sales from Olympic-related promotional activity such as the British Business Embassy and other UK Trade and Investment events.

A key tool in the generation of economic benefits during and after the Games was the GREAT campaign. Launched in 2012 to capitalise on the global attention surrounding the Games and the Diamond Jubilee of the British Monarch, it has developed with an international presence in over 145 countries and just under 300 cities. In the UK, it helps companies export for the first time and establish new markets. The campaign works with over 750 partners, including world renowned organisations like McLaren, The Premier League, BBC and BAFTA. GREAT has already secured confirmed incremental economic returns of GBP 2.7 billion for the UK.

Building on experience from London 2012, British businesses secured more than 60 contracts from the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Sochi 2014 and the Russia 2018 FIFA World Cup. The special relationship that exists between the countries that host back-to-back Olympic and Paralympic Games, built on through a yearly UK-Brazil Dialogue which took place between 2012 and 2016, led to 40 UK companies winning contracts worth in excess of GBP 150m from the Olympic and Paralympic Games Rio 2016.

Additionally, in July 2017, it was reported that since the London Games, 110,000 jobs had been created in the six boroughs surrounding the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The Park, its venues and innovation district are on course to create 40,000 of these jobs by 2025. This growth rate was significantly faster than in the city as a whole, and more than three times the pace forecast in 2013.

A sustainability blueprint for events

Sustainability has been central to London 2012’s wider story. From the start, London 2012 was seen as a unique opportunity to demonstrate sustainability on an unprecedented scale and change the way major events integrate sustainability into management and decision making. One of the main results was the creation of a series of sustainability management tools that became a blueprint for the event industry.

London 2012 was the inspiration for the development of ISO 20121, the first fully certifiable international Sustainability Management System standard.

In collaboration with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and a number of international partners, including the IOC, London 2012 supported the development of an Event Organisers Sector Supplement of the GRI sustainability reporting guidelines.

London 2012 also played a key role in the development of a robust and innovative methodology to account for carbon emissions of major events. This methodology was later adopted by Rio 2016 and, in 2019, further developed by the IOC into a consistent methodology for the measurement of the carbon emissions of the Olympic Games.

Last, but not least, London 2012 developed a comprehensive sustainable sourcing code and a process to integrate sustainability into a procurement governance model and firmly embedded it as an intrinsic part of the definition of value for money, which has been used as an inspiration by many other major events.

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